A feature on the Nutmeg Ballet and its program reaching out to potential male students.

Take Nutmeg alumnus Martino Sauter, for instance. He came to The Nutmeg Ballet in 2010 and graduated from the Professional Two Year Program in 2012. Now a dancer at MOMIX, Sauter founded the social networking sensation “boys of ballet” in 2012 with the goal of placing the spotlight on male ballet dancers through breathtaking images shared on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram (@boysofballet), and on their website, boysofballet.net. The “boysofballet” video on YouTube has already been viewed by thousands and their sites receive hundreds of submissions a day from across the globe.

"While we are continuing to look at ways to restore a longer residency for future seasons, it is a time-consuming process, and as it is essential for both organizations to begin planning their next calendar year of performances, we have decided to move forward with plans for a one-week season by NYCB at SPAC in 2014," SPAC Executive Director Marcia White said in a statement.

Fourteen ballets, six by company founder George Balanchine, the 20th century’s greatest choreographer, will fill the SPAC stage designed for this world-class troupe. While dancing treasures from its matchless repertory, NYCB also presents three new ballets. Two of them, one each by Peter Martins and Christopher Wheeldon, highlight July 13’s Ruby Ball Gala.

Picnics are welcome, but the spirits, beer, and wine should remain at home.

"Agon" and "Rubies" will be presented, lending a Stravinsky-sweet, Balachine-stylish feel to the evening. And when we say "Balanchine-stylish" we mean it: The choreographer's trust is involved, meaning the presentation will highly Balanchinean.

De La Cruz’s first contact with Aspen Santa Fe Ballet was when he auditioned to be a company dancer. He didn’t get the job, mostly because of his height; De La Cruz is 5-feet, 4-inches. But after seeing a piece he had created for a Juilliard showcase, Aspen Santa Fe Ballet directors Tom Mossbrucker and Jean-Philippe Malaty offered De La Cruz a choreography commission. (De La Cruz did eventually get an onstage role in Aspen, dancing the part of the Jester in the annual performances of “The Nutcracker” the past two years.)

The questions pile up. Does the 21st century even need ballerinas? America is one of many Western societies where women fight for equality in the workplace and can no longer expect men to stand when they enter a room; same-sex marriages are now institutionalized. Ballet had a beginning; it may have an end. In particular, the practice of dancing on point may one day seem as bizarre as the bygone Chinese practicing of binding women’s feet. Do we still need an art form whose stage worlds are almost solely heterosexual and whose principal women are shown not as workers but as divinities?

She has sweetly given up the chair in her Paris dressing-room despite my protests, and is curled up on the coffee table. Even clad in a thick body warmer and sweatpants, she is a luminous presence, with dainty, finely drawn features. For a modern Russian ballerina, she is unusually petite: a natural Aurora rather than a long-limbed swan. This fact had seemed to limit her at the Mariinsky, where, the current wisdom goes, you need to dance Swan Lake to be considered for promotion to principal.

A look at the Bolshoi Ballet, past and future, by Clement Crisp in The Financial Times.

We do not know the extent, or even the nature, of the causes. But dancers’ careers are short and the enclosed world of a great ensemble, with an ethic that insists on extreme physical attainment, can breed a sense of injustice, of favouritism, and wholly unbalanced responses. Thirty years ago I talked to Yuri Grigorovich, who had been director of the Bolshoi Ballet for three decades as well as being its chief choreographer – such works as Spartacus (1968), Ivan the Terrible (1975) and The Golden Age (1982) were massive declarations about his massive ensemble – and I asked him about the nature of the company and how he remained its master.

Cillian Murphy directs a music video featuring dancers of the English National Ballet. Video.

The video probably isn’t what you’d expect from the guy who dons a burlap sack and terrorizes folks by using their own fears against them. Here, Murphy delivers some lovely footage that “focuses on the elegance and commitment of ballet dancers.”

A heads up! from a Ballet Alertnik who wishes to remain anonymous, Marina Harss interviews Edward Villella for dancetabs.com:

How is it to be back in NY?

Its absolute heaven. I feel like Ive been culturally deprived for twenty-five years. When I first got down to Miami people would come up to me and ask: what are you doing here? We had to start from nothing and create new habits. The habit there was to have a major company pass through, which meant Giselle, Sleeping Beauty, the nineteenth-century spectacles. Thats all they knew. Its a resort town, a clubbing town, its very shallow culturally. And its very difficult to raise money there. But I knew what I was getting into. I had the opportunity to make a company from the ground up, so all of the mistakes would be mine, and all of the successes. I wanted to make a company that I would have wanted to dance in, from a dancers point of view.

The interview is accompanies by wonderful photos and several video clips.